How the Fed Ended Up Fueling a Subprime Boom
ByPlenty of writers have claimed that the Federal Reserve fueled last decade’s subprime boom by holding interest rates too low for too long after the dot-com crash. But hardly anyone has tried to explain why the Fed did so.
Yours truly has taken a stab at it, together with my former student (and now eminent Market Monetarist) David Beckworth and my former University of Georgia colleague (and current Özye?in University faculty member) Berrak Bahadir. Here is our just-published article in theJournal of Policy Modeling.
Our argument, in brief, is that the Fed blew it by not treating the exceptionally high post-2001 productivity growth rate as warranting an upward revision of the Fed’s interest-rate target (as neoclassical theory would suggest). Instead, Fed officials believed they could maintain a below-natural interest rate target without risking a corresponding increase in inflation…
How the Fed Ended Up Fueling a Subprime Boom
